The Sphere will finally open on September 29th, after 5+ years and $2.3 billion of planning, construction, and asset shuffling. While there has only been one artist residency, one piece of original content and zero sponsorship or marketing dollars announced to date, there is now investor excitement. The illumination of the Sphere’s exterior over July 4th…
Disney CEO Bob Iger has openly stated (link) that linear television is dissolving faster than he expected. With affiliate fees in secular decline as cord-cutting outpaces rate increases and advertising growth increasingly challenged as viewership shifts away from linear TV beyond live games, ESPN is facing a future of continuous revenue declines. Unlike other cable…
MSG Entertainment stock is constructed to be the perfect boring compounder, leveraged to the steady growth of the live entertainment industry in the largest market in the country. There is little operational risk given years of contractual revenue from the Garden’s anchor tenants, multiyear agreements across sponsorship and suites, and the MSGE building portfolio’s importance…
Last week, Telesat announced that it finally secured the funding for Lightspeed, its LEO satellite constellation targeting the global enterprise connectivity market. The stock subsequently doubled as investors contemplate Telesat’s place among other high-profile LEO constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper. We have been waiting for this moment for over 2 years and as…
Yesterday, ESPN announced a sports betting licensing deal with Penn Gaming, which gave up on (and gave away) Barstool Sports (link). Nobody had interest in an ESPN sports betting deal a couple years ago when, under former CEO Bob Chapek, Disney had been seeking over $3 billion in licensing fees over 10 years. Sportsbooks firmly believed…
Following last week’s Q2 2023 Warner Bros. Discovery earnings release, Puck News’ Matt Belloni interviewed LightShed’s Rich Greenfield on the current state and future of WBD, the strategic challenges facing Disney, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s decision to bring back former execs Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs as consultants, as well as the latest news and…
A few weeks ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger gave a candid and thought-provoking interview on CNBC from the annual Sun Valley Conference (link). The strategic challenges laid out in Iger’s recent interview reminded us in many ways of his groundbreaking industry comments on the onset of cord-cutting and its impact on ESPN back in August…
Earlier this year, Google reached an agreement with the NFL to exclusively distribute NFL Sunday Ticket starting with the 2023 season. Sunday Ticket had been exclusively available on DirecTV since its launch in 1994. Google is offering Sunday Ticket at a discounted buy-through of YouTube TV, as well as standalone via YouTube Primetime Channels. Pricing…
Iridium declined 15% yesterday on results that were better than we expected. The sharp selloff appears to have been triggered by investors with higher growth expectations. Specifically, there was apparently some misguided investor expectation of seeing a revenue ramp from direct to device activations in 2023. To be fair, equipment sales did moderate and this…
Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on Wednesday’s Q2 2023 earnings interview (our Q1 2023 questions can be found here). 1) How prepared were you for a joint WGA/SAG strike? The industry has long known a dual strike is a possibility. NFLX appears to have some unique opportunities to mitigate the impact given…
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